Summary: MEASURING THE
USEFULNESS OF
FUNCTION WORDS FOR
AUTHORSHIP
ATTRIBUTION
Shlomo Argamon (argamon@iit.edu)
Illinois Institute of Technology
Shlomo Levitan (levishl@iit.edu)
Illinois Institute of Technology
INTRODUCTION
Some forty years ago, Mosteller and Wallace suggested in
their influential work on the Federalist Papers that a small
number of the most frequent words in a language ('function
words') could usefully serve as indicators of authorial style. The
decades since have seen this work taken up in many ways
including both the use of new analysis techniques (discriminant
analysis, PCA, neural networks, and more), as well as the search
for more sophisticated features by which to capture stylistic
properties of texts. Interestingly, while use of more sophisticated
models and algorithms have often led to more reliable and